_jab (u/_jab) - Readit News

_jab commented on Show HN: Spoon-Bending – a framework for analyzing GPT-5 alignment behavior github.com/pablo-chacon/S... · Posted by u/pablo-chacon

_jab · 9 hours ago

Gotta be honest, I think the spoon bending metaphor is unhelpful, and only misleads the audience and buries the lede here. It took me a while to figure out what this repo actually does.

But the insights are indeed interesting. I'm curious if you've found any way to quantify alignment differences between GPT-5 and the previous generation?

_jab commented on AI is different antirez.com/news/155... · Posted by u/grep_it

_jab · 11 days ago

I'm skeptical of arguments like this. If we look at most impactful technologies since the year 2000, AI is not even in my top 3. Social networking, mobile computing, and cloud computing have all done more to alter society and daily life than has AI.

And yes, I recognize that AI has already created profound change, in that every software engineer now depends heavily on copilots, in that education faces a major integrity challenge, and in that search has been completely changed. I just don't think those changes are on the same level as the normalization of cutting-edge computers in everyone's pockets, as our personal relationships becoming increasingly online, nor as the enablement for startups to scale without having to maintain physical compute infrastructure.

To me, the treating of AI as "different" is still unsubstantiated. Could we get there? Absolutely. We just haven't yet. But some people start to talk about it almost in a way that's reminiscent of Pascal's Wager, as if the slight chance of a godly reward from producing AI means it is rational to devote our all to it. But I'm still holding my breath.

_jab commented on Try and ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/t... · Posted by u/treetalker

throwanem · 16 days ago

Good grief. Quote Dre up top, then totally ignore AAVE and Southern American English which both heavily feature the construction of interest, despite being interested to find out what the Boer pidgin, of all things, has to say. (Why not Basque next? That would be about as relevant!) This they call a linguistic diversity project? Surely they could not have found themselves short of sources!

_jab · 16 days ago

AAVE is definitely underappreciated as the source of a lot of common modern slang. But in this case, the article makes it pretty clear that "try and" is not nearly modern enough to have come from AAVE - they show several attestations from the 1500s and even mention one from 1390.

_jab commented on Read your code etsd.tech/posts/rtfc/... · Posted by u/noeclement

_jab · 22 days ago

I've found that there's a pretty consistent relationship between how clearly I can imagine what the code should look like, and how effective vibe coding is. Part of the reason for that is that it means I'll be more opinionated about the output of the model, and can more quickly tell whether it's done something reasonable.

_jab commented on GHz spiking neuromorphic photonic chip with in-situ training arxiv.org/abs/2506.14272... · Posted by u/juanviera23

fjfaase · 22 days ago

Nice that they can do the processing in the GHz range, but from some pictures in the paper, it seems the system has only 60 'cells', which is rather low compared to the number of cells found in brains of animals that display complex behavior. To me it seems this is an optimization in the wrong dimension.

_jab · 22 days ago

I suspect practicality is not the goal here, but rather a proof of concept. Perhaps they saw speed as an important technical barrier to cross

_jab commented on Live coding interviews measure stress, not coding skills hadid.dev/posts/living-co... · Posted by u/mustaphah

_jab · 25 days ago

Sometimes when I give simpler technical questions (applies to system design too), candidates begin to massively overthink it. The question seems so simple that they start anticipating high-scope extensions that don't actually exist, like turning a basic algorithm into a distributed, high-availability pipeline. There's only so much you can do as an interviewer to rein candidates back in at that point, and those interviews tend to go off the rails pretty quickly, with little code actually ending up being written.

Thing is, I reckon those candidates aren't a good fit anyways. The biggest mistake I see engineers who join startups make is that they pursue excessively sophisticated solutions, with robustness that does not justify the added complexity. I'm sure these candidates are smart, but they're not good fits for the high-velocity, simplicity-obsessed technical environment of a product-play startup.

_jab commented on Claude Code weekly rate limits · Posted by u/thebestmoshe

Wowfunhappy · a month ago

I'm probably not going to hit the weekly limit, but it makes me nervous that the limit is weekly as opposed to every 36 hours or something. If I do hit the limit, that's it for the entire week—a long time to be without a tool I've grown accustomed to!

I feel like someone is going to reply that I'm too reliant on Claude or something. Maybe that's true, but I'd feel the same about the prospect of loosing ripgrep for a week, or whatever. Loosing it for a couple of days is more palatable.

Also, I find it notable they said this will affect "less than 5% of users". I'm used to these types of announcements claiming they'll affect less than 1%. Anthropic is saying that one out of every 20 users will hit the new limit.

_jab · a month ago

> Anthropic is saying that one out of every 20 users will hit the new limit.

Very good point, I find it unlikely that 1/20 users is account sharing or running 24/7 agentic workflows.

_jab commented on Enough AI copilots, we need AI HUDs geoffreylitt.com/2025/07/... · Posted by u/walterbell

_jab · a month ago

There’s a lot of ideation for coding HUDs in the comments, but ironically I think the core feature of most coding copilots is already best described as a HUD: tab completion.

And interestingly, that is indeed the feature I find most compelling from Cursor. I particularly love when I’m doing a small refactor, like changing a naming convention for a few variables, and after I make the first edit manually Cursor will jump in with tab suggestions for the rest.

To me, that fully encapsulates the definition of a HUD. It’s a delightful experience, and it’s also why I think anyone who pushes the exclusively-copilot oriented Claude Code as a superior replacement is just wrong.

_jab commented on Windsurf employee #2: I was given a payout of only 1% what my shares where worth twitter.com/premqnair/sta... · Posted by u/rfurmani

itake · a month ago

what are those shares worth with the company gutted? Seems like not much of a choice if leadership and IP are gone...

_jab · a month ago

The company should have been worth at least the cash it had on hand, which has been reported as ~$100M. It's also been reported that all vested equity and VC shares were bought out (although apparently perhaps with a few exceptions for people who declined the offer), which meant that the employee unvested equity stakes were "undiluted" from whatever they were before (hard to judge, but maybe 5-10%), to 100%. So every employee had their stake in the company increase 10x-20x. So if the company had then decided to simply close up and distribute the remaining cash as dividends to the employees, it would be as if each employee had simply been bought out pre-deal at a $1-2B valuation. And that was the absolute worst case scenario - clearly Windsurf found a better deal with Cognition.

_jab commented on Windsurf employee #2: I was given a payout of only 1% what my shares where worth twitter.com/premqnair/sta... · Posted by u/rfurmani

_jab · a month ago

The details here remain unclear to me, and even this tweet is somewhat vague.

> I was given an offer that would explode same day. I had to forfeit all of my vested shares earned over my 3.5+ years at Windsurf. I was ultimately given a payout of only 1% of what my shares would have been worth at the time of the deal.

Was forfeiting the vested shares conditional on accepting the offer, or did he have no choice over the matter? Was the payout what he was offered as part of accepting the deal, or was that his consolation for not accepting it? The wording is genuinely unclear to me.

I literally see 3 interpretations here:

1. Offer was to forfeit shares in exchange for 1% payout, but OP rejected and still has shares

2. Offer was to forfeit shares in exchange for undisclosed payout, but OP rejected and got 1% payout instead and still has shares

3. He had to forfeit shares regardless of accepting offer, got 1% payout

(1) and (3) are both shitty offers from Google, but (2) is reasonable. Exploding offers are not uncommon in tech acquisitions. My guess is that (2) is what happened, since that's not in contradiction with prior reporting.